Like many of you, doing my own car maintenance is a big part of my life. Not only does it offer some financial advantages, it also gives a little relief from, well, everything else. Call it automotive catharsis. Some jobs, though, I always left to the pros—until recently, when I decided to give a front-end alignment a…

A reader named Justin sent us the link to a small, not particularly well-viewed YouTube channel called NewbieMechanic, which is essentially just a bunch of videos of a British guy wrenching on his Toyota MR2. He’s not really a great mechanic, the videos aren’t particularly well-done, but they’re so honest and simple…

Here’s a question: Would you ever buy a crucial suspension part from Ebay that costs one-tenth as much as a similar piece at the parts store? Many of you would answer “no,” because something just doesn’t feel right about it. But it’s easy to understand why so many people do buy these parts when there’s little…

I don’t know how long I’ve had this stupid fascination with putting a wood deck into the back of my clunky old Volkswagen, like some enclosed truck, or the world’s smallest ‘70s van. Finally, my car now has one, and I’m surprised at how easy it was to build.

Right in front of a tire shop in Jersey City, there exists a small, symbiotic community: a huge, deep pothole and the group of guys who like to watch cars bottom out in it. It’s a simple life, but a rewarding one, punctuated with the scrapes of underbody slamming into asphalt and the exultant screams of the voyeurs.

It was one of those scorching-hot May afternoons when the air conditioning might as well just give up, where a slight breeze is the only break from molasses-thick humidity. It seemed far-fetched at the time, but tucked away in an unsuspecting backwoods Missouri lake house resided a four-wheeled curiosity: a Triumph…

The thing about this fix is that I can almost see how it seemed like a good idea at the time. This person’s ratty old ‘80s-era Mercedes-Benz SL must have had a big hole in the convertible top, so the owner thought ‘what keeps out rain?’ An umbrella! Problem solved! Well, not really.

This is one of those times where I find that my gut instincts are dead wrong. My initial reaction to the Quebecois owner of this 1999 Toyota Tercel that has a rear suspension setup that utilizes logs and chicken wire is one of a certain, perverse respect. I know that’s wrong—the guy is really closer to an idiot…

If you have a pulse and have driven in a car, you understand our roadways suck. That’s also true in Portland, Oregon, where a group of self-described anarchists have reportedly patched a few potholes to call attention to the piece of shit that is the city’s roads.

Trying to figure out the ‘first’ of anything is a tricky business, and is rarely as simple as it seems. And yet I keep finding myself drawn to things that may be automotive firsts. I won’t say that this ad for a Ford dealer confusingly named “Ferraris” is the first animated car, but it’s likely pretty close.

Tesla owners, depending on where they live, may have to drive hundreds of miles to reach a service center for their vehicle, but the company is reportedly working on a program to allow owners to access repair manuals and perform their own maintenance.

Joey’s a big guy. Nobody is questioning that. What Joey is questioning is why Hyundai is refusing to fix a broken part of his 2015 Sonata under their five-year warranty, and why Hyundai feels that reminding him he’s “large” is justification for not repairing his car. Oh, and they think he gets out of his seat wrong.…

I’m pretty sure that almost any kid looking for discarded piles of porno magazines in the forest (the woods were the leading distribution system for smut in the pre-internet era) has found old, rusted-out, abandoned cars wedged improbably in the woods. While I’d always wondered what it would take to actually get one…

You may recall that there has been a struggle among those of us that like to work on our own cars. A struggle against something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which suggested that you don’t really own the software that runs your car, hence, you can’t touch it. Happily, that’s not going to happen, at…

There’s a wheelchair-using gearhead that built an amazing garage, with lifts and everything, so he and his friends can work on cars. Three of his neighbors are suing him to make him stop and tear down the garage, and they’ve even suggested that Jesus will kill him with his breath. It’s maddening, but I’ll try and…